Discussion The 2025 Game Thread: Big Stupid Games Edition

I've been playing ChernobyLite, a .. uh .. disappointing game.

It's visually almost identical to Stalker. You're some dude in Chrenobyl, and there's been an explosion at the CNPP, and there's an area called The Zone, and there's radiation, and "chernobylite storms AKA emissions", and you're being hounded by a villain called The Black Stalker.

The gameplay loop is not good.

The idea is that you have a base in the zone, and every day you wake up, pick one of around 10 maps, have a walk around, kill soldiers, pick up spare parts, salvage, ammo, food, etc, and then go back to your base, use a portion of the loot to survive, and another portion to improve your base. Kinda like Fallout Shelter idk never played the game.
Sometimes you are on that map for a mission, which involves going to a specific building and participating in pre-scripted events.

But .. it doesnt work in practice.

AI is dumb.
Survival is trivial.
You are allotted a short time each run because The Black Stalker then shows up and starts hitting you.
You can extract just by pressing a single keyboard key, via a Rick & Morty Portal Gun.
There is no penalty for failure.
There is no penalty for death.
There is one of the most obnoxious voiceovers i have ever heard, and it's constant.
Your weapons are too strong and they stunlock enemies.
Ammo is nearly unlimited. And so are medkits, etc
Even building base upgrades is trivial.
Some missions are like, idk 5 minutes long.


.. see .. if this game had been tuned better .. where you needed to spend more time on the map, immerse yourself, scavenge more to survive, to build stuff, and where extraction was more difficult, maybe that would put some sense of risk, some sense that you're actually in that world. But the game reeally fails hard at this, and the nice visuals do nothing to change this fact, and the fact that there's so few maps also ruins the quality of the visuals, as it's always the same 4/5/6 things. Maps are small, you can sprint from one side to the next. Radiation is barely a minor complication.

Plus, the base looks ugly, the base-build UI is horrendous, and then 5 minutes of sprinting through the same map as before to just stunlock 3/4 enemies ? That's not enough as a game.

5/10, would not recommend.



Let's see if Oblivion Remastered is any better.

GodisanAtheist said:

- That's a shame. It sounds a lot like what I'd want from a "survival" game: Base building, leveling, a narrative and a questline instead of just open ended... but it sounds like they didn't get the mix and the feel right.

Fallout 4 came really close to an ideal survival game, it just had too many settlements and the map was just too damn packed with stuff. I wish there was something out there like Fallout 4 (not even necessarily an FPS) but the settlement mechanic was the core of the game rather than a (albeit) fun afterthought.

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The Fallout idea is good, but it really lacks the empty spaces of F1/2 and the misery that comes with being in a wasteland. One day, maybe, we can hope for a grimdark Fallout.

I think Stalker 2 is just better at everything - though it doesn't have base building. But, if it did have base building, and less hold-your-hand storyline, the world + visuals would have almost been there. And this imho was a serious problem with S2, you always have a place to go to. Instead, S1 leaves you alone in the zone, and if you want to follow the storyline, well good luck, you need to figure out HOW TO. At best it's like, "yeah go to the Cordon, ask around, i'm sure someone knows more".

GodisanAtheist said:

Aaaannnndddd Half-Life 2 (base campaign) is a wrap!

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Next up, http://nolfrevival.tk/ ???

Kids may enjoy watching you play that.

igor_kavinski said:

Next up, http://nolfrevival.tk/ ???

Kids may enjoy watching you play that.

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if you're into that sort of stuff, you need to find a way to play TimeSplitters Future Perfect on PC.

DigDog said:

if you're into that sort of stuff, you need to find a way to play TimeSplitters Future Perfect on PC.

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Thanks. It's on PSN for a measly few bucks.

i've been playing the Oblivion remaster .. with mixed results.

First off, maybe it's a me problem, because i've started the game on Master difficulty, and i know others too have complained that the difficulty bump is too high. From what i've read apparently it's also the same on Expert, so essentially you just got Normal and Easy as options.
AFAIK, Oblivion (it's been 18 years since i played it, on my Nv 8800GTS) does not have the ridiculous overpowered weapons you can get with Smithing in Skyrim, so it may not be necessary to play on Master to have a decent experience, however again if i recall correctly, Oblivion had spellcrafting that was just as overpowered.
*i think there was a Drain Fatigue spell that grated with the game stats, as all mobs regardless of HP had a Fatigue value of 1-100, so you could just mass-nuke entire cities by doing a 100-point Drain Fatigue AOE*

The UI is still kinda horrid. I'm genuinely lost at times, having difficulty crafting a potion. And, you know, even looking at the stats of a shield is hard. Even though it's been "upgraded", it's still completely awful.

Visually, it's an improvement. And, i used to think Oblivion was a masterpiece of visual style, possibly the only game i ever launched to "just play". Go for walksies in the hills of Tamriel.

Gameplay is still quite janky, and i don't think it's gonna get better. For example, i just find it weird that you can EASILY just run past that endgame mob, go to the chest it's defending, loot it all with a single keypress while time stands still, then run out before the mob has even decided it will attack you.
On the other hand, now mobs will chase you for friggin' hours.

And mobs cant climb even any tiny obstacle.

Mobs DO path better when it's flat ground, so now alerting one mob in a dungeon will quickly bring over the allies. I mean, the gameplay is clearly better than Oblivion, but it's still bad because Oblivion was bad. You didn't play Oblivion for the gameplay, no you played Oblivion to see if your GPU could cope. And, you really gotta remember this if you are thinking "is this game worth my money". It's fifty bucks OR you need to get GamePass.

On the plus side, the remaster features something i have always wanted, but had never seen before - your walking speed changes based on the terrain. So, if you are climbing up a steep hill, you can't sprint the same way as when you're running downhill. This may not seem like a lot, but "sprinting uphill" is something that's always taken me out of the game, regardless of the game.

I guess i will keep playing for a while; but having already played the whole game twice, i'm not gonna be surprised when i find out who the Gray Fox is, or running any of the other quests that made this original such a great game.

igor_kavinski said:

Thanks. It's on PSN for a measly few bucks.

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wut? you can play it on playstation?? that would be awesome.
HOLY SHIT
it's got the PC's remastered visuals. you need to get this right now !

DigDog said:

you need to get this right now !

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Yeah, just as soon as I get my annual vacation. I paid north of $800 for my PS5, then didn't get to use it for more than 20 hours in total coz LIFE.

And so far, I don't know WHEN I will be able to get my annual vacation. Been having to delay it every month due to ongoing projects.

This is all because I decided NOT to become a doc because I had an ethical issue with prescribing drugs to patients that may or may not work. No good deed goes unpunished, I swear.

i am also playing Command & Conquer Tempest Rising.

It's Command & Conquer.

You harvest Tiberium Tempest, and you buy tanks and infantry.

It's in no way better than C&C95.

Cutscenes suck. C&C had some of the best cutscenes in history.

After games like Supreme Commander have come and gone, TR *still* doesnt have zoom out. REALLY?

The UI is so-so.

They use per-unit commands, not as badly as Starcraft; you can select a whole bunch of different units, and the group will show each activation button, and each type of unit has a different activation hotkey, so you don't need to spam-click "as a skill". It's still not what i want from a C&C clone.

The game has per-building queues for fabrication. This really does suck because in C&C the currency that mattered was not just dollars, but also time. So infantry was relatively expensive for what you got, but you could build a shitton of them, so the loss was acceptable as a stopgap solution.
Instead here if you have 2 vehicle factories, you can build 2 vehicles at the same time.

Unit pathing is vastly better than C&C95.
... i mean .. that's the least you can do.

The combat system is not completely rock-paper-scissors, but you still get some units that attack far better some specific targets. And, it's weird how, it's not the units you expect. Like, you would expect that medium tanks are the best unit to destroy buildings, but naw, it's actually Drone Troopers. infantry.
All in all my experience wasn't horrible (can't recall the game, but essentially a enormous force getting destroyed by a minor one because the first isn't ideal to combat the second), but the resulting gameplay is still that i amass a huge bunch of random units and throw them at the enemy, then restock & repeat.

Oh and they have a nearly-identical mission with the Commando. Homage, amairite?


I don't really love it. SupCom is way better, even SupCom 2 is better.

*****************

see, i used to play C&C95 on LAN. I was lucky enough to work in a place where the owners had 4 PC on LAN, initially to play Doom, but then C&C came out and we lost our minds.
And, i was GREAT at that game. 4-player free for all regularly descended into 1/2/3 players vs DigDog, or "sky" because that's where i got my gaming nick, from a windows glitch.

Now, one of the things that made C&C great is that, i could essentially count the money that the other guy was fielding. I could have an idea if their power would go out by killing a single power generator, if they had units near the base or if i could engineer-steal it, all based on the fact that:

1. you can only build 1 unit and 1 building at the time
2. it takes time to build these depending on what they are
3. you only have a specific amount of starting money
4. the amount of money you earn is based on your choice of buildings and vehicles

Essentially, C&C95 had a great in-game economy. Other C&C games did not, which is why i always found them inferior. The "huge-ass zerg of tanks" was something you were not entitled to, unless you played really carefully, minimized your losses, managed your tiberium harvesting, and lived near the repair bay. Also, no brute-forcing defenses; If someone was turtled in, you needed to go hunt their harvesters so their earnings plummeted, OR you needed to find a weak spot, and cut their power.

Tempest Rising doesnt really have these things, and while i appreciate that also the other Command & Conquer games didn't either, i really don't see a point doing a reboot if you can't fix the old problems.

DigDog said:

i've been playing the Oblivion remaster .. with mixed results.

First off, maybe it's a me problem, because i've started the game on Master difficulty, and i know others too have complained that the difficulty bump is too high. From what i've read apparently it's also the same on Expert, so essentially you just got Normal and Easy as options.
AFAIK, Oblivion (it's been 18 years since i played it, on my Nv 8800GTS) does not have the ridiculous overpowered weapons you can get with Smithing in Skyrim, so it may not be necessary to play on Master to have a decent experience, however again if i recall correctly, Oblivion had spellcrafting that was just as overpowered.
*i think there was a Drain Fatigue spell that grated with the game stats, as all mobs regardless of HP had a Fatigue value of 1-100, so you could just mass-nuke entire cities by doing a 100-point Drain Fatigue AOE*

The UI is still kinda horrid. I'm genuinely lost at times, having difficulty crafting a potion. And, you know, even looking at the stats of a shield is hard. Even though it's been "upgraded", it's still completely awful.

Visually, it's an improvement. And, i used to think Oblivion was a masterpiece of visual style, possibly the only game i ever launched to "just play". Go for walksies in the hills of Tamriel.

Gameplay is still quite janky, and i don't think it's gonna get better. For example, i just find it weird that you can EASILY just run past that endgame mob, go to the chest it's defending, loot it all with a single keypress while time stands still, then run out before the mob has even decided it will attack you.
On the other hand, now mobs will chase you for friggin' hours.

And mobs cant climb even any tiny obstacle.

Mobs DO path better when it's flat ground, so now alerting one mob in a dungeon will quickly bring over the allies. I mean, the gameplay is clearly better than Oblivion, but it's still bad because Oblivion was bad. You didn't play Oblivion for the gameplay, no you played Oblivion to see if your GPU could cope. And, you really gotta remember this if you are thinking "is this game worth my money". It's fifty bucks OR you need to get GamePass.

On the plus side, the remaster features something i have always wanted, but had never seen before - your walking speed changes based on the terrain. So, if you are climbing up a steep hill, you can't sprint the same way as when you're running downhill. This may not seem like a lot, but "sprinting uphill" is something that's always taken me out of the game, regardless of the game.

I guess i will keep playing for a while; but having already played the whole game twice, i'm not gonna be surprised when i find out who the Gray Fox is, or running any of the other quests that made this original such a great game.

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There’s already a mod that fixes the difficulty slider scaling. Only one I have installed because adept is too easy and expert is impossible.

Similar feelings as you about the game otherwise. I played it a lot back in the day but never actually beat it so maybe I’ll stick it out.

The only way I'm buying the Oblivion remaster is if the FCOM team manages to bring that over because there was no way I could play the vanilla base game again.

GodisanAtheist said:

Never managed to make it all the way through Oblivion back in the day, just too much open world bloat and not enough core narrative to keep me involved.

Might give the re-make-aster a shot at some point. Not today though. Not today.

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Despite me sinking thousands of hours into Oblivion when it was released, I've only ever beat it once and to this day, I honestly don't know if that's a mark of a great game or a shit one. I always tend to get sidetracked in the open world games and I'll end up doing everything possible outside of the main quest which usually lead to me getting burnt out and either starting a new character or moving onto a different game. But, I did keep going back to Oblivion and it was well worth spending an entire weekend trying to get the major overhaul mods installed, so despite the terrible features they must have done something right back then.